Eight public hospital doctors in Nicaragua on Friday said that they have been fired after violating alleged orders not to treat wounded protesters opposing Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s government.
Reporters saw several of the dismissal letters signed by the director of the Oscar Danilo Rosales Arguello hospital in Leon, and they did not specify a cause.
“Our crime is having tended to the wounded from the protests or having supported the marches in some way, asking for justice, freedom and a real democracy,” said Javier Pastora Membreno, who was head of surgery and endoscopy for the hospital before he was among those let go.
Photo: AFP
“We are doctors, not terrorists,” he added.
There have been complaints for weeks that anti-government protesters were being turned away from public medical facilities, but Ortega and his government say no such order ever existed.
“It is totally false that anyone has been denied attention in the hospitals,” the president said in an interview with Fox News broadcast this week.
Nicaraguan Minister of Health Sonia Castro also said previously that the nation’s health system “has never, at any time, been closed to any treatment.”
The hospital director declined to be interviewed.
Pastora, who had worked for the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health for 33 years, on Friday spoke at a demonstration outside the hospital to protest the firings. The other fired doctors were there along with a hundred or more demonstrators.
Those sacked worked in diverse fields, such as pediatrics, spinal medicine, gastroenterology, oncological surgery and pediatrics, and included the only doctor in the municipality specializing in infectious diseases.
“I do not know if the ministry authorities are clear on what this decision means for the quality of attention to the people and for the training of doctors,” Pastora said.
Aaron Delgado said he was performing surgery on a breast cancer patient when he was interrupted and told to report to human resources, where he received his dismissal notice.
“They did not even let me finish the operation,” Delgado said. “All this because a month ago outside the hospital we treated the wounded from a massacre perpetrated by the government’s paramilitaries against citizens who were at barricades in the neighborhoods of Leon.”
Also on Friday, police reported the arrest of a 42-year-old man in the killing of Rayneia Lima, a young Brazilian medical student who was shot dead while riding in a vehicle in Managua on Monday night.
A police statement identified the suspect as a security guard and said they seized from him an M4 rifle, which is not commonly used by private security firms.
The rector of the American University of Managua, where Lima was a student, earlier this week said that she had been attacked by pro-government forces.
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